YouTube still has full albums on its platform, and that’s a problem
Lyor Cohen isn’t off to a good start in his new role as global head of music at YouTube. In an interview with Recode last week, the longtime music executive — who was brought in to smooth over relations with the music industry — claimed that YouTube “had a solution” to help its Content ID team stop users who post full albums without artist or label approval, an issue that has plagued YouTube and infuriated the music industry for years.
Here’s what Cohen told Recode:
Quote:
When I told [the Content ID team] about the albums, they said, “Yeah, they jumped over our Content ID by speeding up the tempo of the music, slightly. We’ve already got a solution for it.” I had them walk me through the process. I felt so proud that I could really talk to people in the industry that had this feeling about Content ID, and finding bad actors, and confidently say, “We’ve got a team that is dedicated to fixing this.”
But a simple search of YouTube will show that there is still a major problem with illegally uploaded content on the service. Searching for “full albums” will pull up classic albums like Bob Marley’s Legend, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, as well as new releases like John Mayer’s The Search for Everything, and Humanz by the Gorillaz, which points listeners to an illegal download link in the event the album is blocked by Warner Music Group. And that’s just the first page of results.
A deeper search pulled up immensely popular albums from the ‘00s like 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Lady Gaga’s The Fame, and Katy Perry’s One of The Boys, as well as E•MO•TION by Carly Rae Jepsen, the last two albums from both Jessie J and Ariana Grande, and Imagine Dragons’ entire catalog.
Many of these videos are monetized by the labels, with pre-roll and mid-roll ads on videos like Low End Theory, Outkast’s ATLiens and Dr. Dre’s 2001, for example, but the license for the videos are tied to a single song off the project, not the entire album.
That means if one user uploads a full album, and another user only uploads a single song from that album and they both get the same amount of views, the payout would be the same. Obviously that’s an awful return on investment for the labels — especially in the early weeks of a project’s release — and can potentially mean a massive earnings cut, depending on how many tracks were on the album.
As one would expect, the music industry isn’t happy in the least, with multiple industry sources expressing frustration with YouTube touting improved piracy policing features, when, as one source put it, “literally nothing has changed.”
[The Verge]
